Rights owner Chorion, the home of such children’s favourites as Noddy, OLIVIA and the Mr Men has seen annual sales lift by more than a third to £53.7 million. According to Chorion’s chairman, in Monday’s Guardian, “when things get tougher, people veer towards the things they know and love. It’s a lot like comfort eating”.

This is clearly true and is driving the slew of brands and branded activity invoking childhood nostalgia. The Guardian itself spent last week reprinting old kids’ comics as a giveaway. But it feels like the opportunity to face hard times with brave and inspiring design is being lost in this avalanche of mawkish behaviour. Adults are boosting Chorion’s profits, with the likes of “Little Miss Chatterbox” helping to sell 1m Mr Men t-shirts a month in the States. We are becoming a culture of big babies, and branding is playing its part in dumbing us all down. But one can’t argue with sales success, and as Chorion’s chairman notes “ Noddy has been through the recession many times before”.

Our prediction in January that recession is an auspicious time to invest in a brand’s future is looking hollow, though it was not unfounded. In September’s “best global brands” edition of Business Week, they point to the high proportion of famous campaigns created during times of economic challenge. A quarter of the post 1945 ads in Advertising Age’s “top 100 ad campaigns of the 20th century” were launched in a recession. For example BMW’s “the ultimate driving machine” was born in the oil crisis of 1974. It’s still paying dividends for the brand today. Martin Puris, who came up with the slogan, states in the Business Week article - “I love bad times. In good times people are less apt to try new things. In bad times they have to start to do things better”.

Comfort branding might be tactically savvy, but is it missing the real opportunity? And do we want to be remembered (if we are remembered at all) as the generation of brand communicators who were given opportunities both economic and in new media technologies, but could only look backwards to the past?